Can Science Find God? Stephen Meyer vs. Michael Shermer

NOTE: This transcript is auto-generated. As such, errors may be present.

Welcome to ID the Future. Delighted to have you with us. I’m your host, Andrew McDiarmid. Well, today we’re bringing you the first half of a fascinating discussion between philosopher of science, Dr. Stephen Meyer and historian of science and founding editor of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer. The conversation was hosted by comedian and podcaster Bryan Callan. On the Bryan Callan show, the topic, well, quite a few things. In part one, Meyer and Shermer explain that they both take a Bayesian approach to science. That is, they assign a likelihood ratio to a given hypothesis based on the available evidence. This begs a few questions, which the two men then discuss. How close can we get to the truth of a claim? And when it comes to scientific explanations for the origin and development of life on Earth, which hypothesis has predictions that match what we actually observe in nature?

Callan admits to being romanced by Meyer’s argument for intelligent design. Schirmer, not so much. Yet he is humble and curious enough to sit down for an hour and a half to discuss the questions. Why? Because he’s interested in them. And as Meyer puts it, no matter what side of the question you come down on, if you’re interested, we consider you a kindred spirit, a colleague, if you will, and you’re welcome at the table.

During this half of the conversation, Meyer summarizes some of his arguments for design, while Schirmer pushes back and asks valid questions.

Callan, for his part, has the sense that humans with their limitless potential, seem to be drawn in a certain direction toward truth and beauty. Is that an accident of nature, or is there a higher truth that prompts it?

Meier and Shermer also debate the multiverse and the Big Bang, the origin of information and the role of mind in the universe.

Here’s Bryan Callan, Stephen Meyer and Michael Shermer.

[00:02:06] Bryan Callen: Now this is the Bryan Callan Show. Ladies and gentlemen, our debate today. Our question is the God question and Michael Shermer. I’ve interviewed you before. Stephen Meyer, I have read your book, or I’ve. It’s a dense book. You gotta pack a lunch. But it’s an ambitious project and I wanna get through. Let’s do a short introduction of what you guys do. I’ll let you guys give me the bio and. And. Cause you guys do a better job of it. I’ve heard it before. Just so we have an idea of what we’re gonna do, and the way I wanna conduct this is I wanna ask you guys my naive layman’s question. Full disclosure, I find Dr. Stephen Meyer’s argument to be something I’m very much romanced by. The fix is in. I lean in his direction. I believe in some kind of a God. Michael’s an atheist, but he’s a moral objectivist. So we’re gonna get into all these questions and I can’t wait. You guys are, you know, you have bigger brains than I do, and, and I really appreciate the fact that you are willing to take the these questions on in good faith and you’re unrelenting and I think you’re very important voices, so. Dr. Stephen Meyer, welcome.

You’ve written this book. I want to get it Right. It’s the Return of the God Hypothesis. Three Discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe.

Can you tell us a little bit about what you do? You have your PhD in the philosophy of science, right?

[00:03:31] Dr. Stephen Meyer: PhD in the philosophy of science. My background was in physics and earth science and I did the PhD was on the subject of origin of life biology, which I did at Cambridge University. And I taught at the university level for 12 years after finishing the PhD and then went to head up a program at the Discovery Institute, the Center for Science and Culture, where I’ve been since 2002. We’re kind of the international hub of scientists and philosophers who are challenging, for lack of a better word, scientific materialism. The worldview of scientific materialism. A worldview that says that. That science supports a no design, no God, no purpose perspective on the universe, that matter and energy are the things from which everything else comes. And you can explain everything by reference to.

[00:04:18] Bryan Callen: Yeah, matter and energy. So cozy. So cozy when you’re dealing with tragedy. You lost your child. Listen, everything’s matter and energy.

[00:04:25] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Yeah, exactly. So anyway, yeah, so I head up that program. We’ve got research projects now all over the world and a group of about 40 to 50 affiliated fellows who are scientists and philosophers who are sympathetic to this perspective.

[00:04:39] Bryan Callen: Yes. And you’ve, you’ve done your best in this book to make an objective, measurable, empirical argument for the idea that there is some kind of a mind behind the universe, that there is a design behind the designer.

[00:04:55] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Right. I’ve written three big, fat, probably overly long books. Signature in the Cell, Darwin, Stout, and now Return of the God Hypothesis. The first two books were making the argument that we see in biology in particular, with things like the digital code and the nanotechnology in cells, evidence of a designing intelligence of some kind. In this third book, I address the question, what is the identity of that designing intelligence or what else can we know about the attributes of that? Designing intelligence? And. And what can science tell us about that? And so I broadened the scope of inquiry to include physics and cosmology as well as biology. And you’re right, it’s an ambitious project, but something I’ve been thinking about for 35 years and happy to finally have it done.

[00:05:42] Bryan Callen: That’s awesome. And Michael, first of all, thank you. Because your book Conspiracy, I draw upon because I have a podcast called Conspiracy Social Club where Sam Tripoli, the great comic that he is, is a conspiracy theorist. And I’m constantly referencing your book to debunk all the insanity out there. And I like the subtitle of your book, which is why the Rational Believe the Irrational. And you’ve always been somebody that I. You’re kind of one of my go tos because you’ve just always kind of, you know, you’re. You. You created Skeptic magazine and you’re at the helm over there and you’re always the one who says, not so fast. This might be magical thinking. So can you tell us a little bit about your background? You have. You have your PhD in the Philosophy.

[00:06:27] Michael Shermer: Of history of science.

[00:06:28] Bryan Callen: Yeah, history of science. Right.

[00:06:29] Michael Shermer: And I also have a graduate degree in experimental psych. And then I had a 10 year gap in there in which I was a professional bike racer, so.

[00:06:36] Bryan Callen: Damn. An athlete and a scholar. Dude.

[00:06:38] Michael Shermer: Very cool.

[00:06:39] Bryan Callen: And Stephen Boxes, so we got. I love it, man.

[00:06:41] Michael Shermer: So afterwards we’re going out, but I appreciate that.

[00:06:45] Bryan Callen: I appreciate when.

Yeah.

[00:06:48] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Racing bike.

[00:06:48] Michael Shermer: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I don’t know. I got two artificial hips now, so.

[00:06:51] Bryan Callen: I didn’t know you were a professional.

[00:06:53] Michael Shermer: Yeah, I raced Race across America, the 3,000 mile transcontinental bike race, which I did five times. And then I was race director for 10 years and I owned the race with some other people, and then I don’t do that anymore. But yeah, so.

[00:07:06] Bryan Callen: Well, the first time I met Michael, I had listened to you and I always thought of you. I thought you were like this nerd. I thought you had never done a sport. And he shows up in this bike outfit and he’s got. His arms are jacked, he’s gunned. And I’m like, what’s going on? He goes, well, I got some Greek and I’m half Greek, and I. And I bike all the time. But I appreciate that because when you’re involved in philosophy, there’s something to coming into contact with objective reality, getting inside your body and just living life and being out there. I think it gives you an understanding you can’t measure.

[00:07:35] Michael Shermer: Well, embodied cognition. I mean, there’s a whole field of study on that. This idea that, you know, you were born into the wrong body is nonsense. You are your body. You know, that’s a kind of a false dualism. But that, that has to do with woke stuff and gender. We get into all that. But yeah. So my day job is publishing Skeptic magazine and running the podcast, the Michael Shermer show, in which I talk to anybody. Right. Like Steve and I had on. We did like two and a half hours about your book when it came out. And I’ll talk to anybody because I’m curious to know, is it possible I’m wrong in this new idea also why people believe what they believe? You know, no one, you mentioned, you know, conspiracy theory. No one thinks that they hold some crazy, irrational conspiracy belief because they wouldn’t believe it if they thought it was completely crazy. They believe it because they think it’s true. And I say, you know, no one in the history of the world’s ever joined a cult. They join a group that they think is going to be great.

[00:08:27] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Right?

[00:08:27] Michael Shermer: There’s no such thing as a pseudoscientist. No one in the history of the world has ever gotten up in the morning. Well, I’m a pseudoscientist. I’m going down to my pseudo lab and run some pseudo experiments to confirm my pseudo theory. They think they’re doing real science. Right? So how do you know what to believe? So we start with knowledge justified true belief. What should I believe and what is justified? So I take a Bayesian approach, that is assigning a probability between, say, 1 and 99 of something being true to the extent that you can assign a number to it. So, and I invoke Cromwell’s rule, which is Oliver Cromwell, who said, I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, you might be mistaken. Right? So Cromwell’s rule in Bayesian reasoning is you never assign a 0 or 100 to anything because we don’t know. I’m not God. I’m not omniscient and omnipotent, and neither are you. Or if you prefer the secular version, there is objective reality only. I don’t know what it is, and you don’t either. So we have to start with, you know, kind of a epistemic humility. I don’t really know for sure. Here’s what I think is true at the moment. I may change my mind and we’ll see how it goes. So that’s why I Like talking to people just in case I could be wrong on this or that.

[00:09:35] Bryan Callen: Well, I’m going to push back on that. So I’m going to start with. I’m going to, I’m going to pose these questions to you Michael, and then you can piggyback because you’re the skeptic here. You know, we do know. It seems that we’re here. Most people are here who are engaged in the best that’s been thought and said. We educate ourselves, we study science, we study philosophy, we study history. And I think we do it all because we want to get closer to the truth. Because there is this idea in. We have, we seem to have this inherent need to know what is actually real, what is actually true, what is the bedrock. I can more into regardless of where the winds blow. And one of the liabilities of being an intellectual and reading all the science and all the history and all the philosophy is that you find yourself moving in a circle. You know, you, you asked that question when the last time you guys spoke. Is there. Will we ever come to a consensus? My, my, my, my suggestion is no, not, not as long as we keep talking the way we do and not. I think the contribution of faith is the idea that there must be something that all of us sort of understand as truth. So, so my first question to you is do you believe in an objective truth, in a higher truth, in the idea that we are. What is that thing that we’re all looking for?

[00:10:57] Michael Shermer: Where is that truth with a small T that is something confirmed to such a degree it would be reasonable to offer your provisional assent. That is to say most people think this is. There’s a lot of evidence. The evidence converges to this one conclusion, doesn’t converge some other conclusion. So it’s reasonable for today to assume this is true and keep an open mind just in case could be refuted tomorrow. The Big Bang theory, the theory of evolution, climate change is human caused vaccines work or masks don’t work, whatever it.

[00:11:27] Bryan Callen: Is, those are all measurable truths that rely on data.

[00:11:31] Michael Shermer: Something else.

[00:11:32] Bryan Callen: I am.

[00:11:33] Michael Shermer: Well, like what?

[00:11:34] Bryan Callen: Well, a meta truth. Because, because I’m after the idea that there might be within those truths there might be an all encompassing truth. So let’s take.

[00:11:44] Michael Shermer: Well, you mean so that we could even approach the question that is rationality, that that is what’s. What’s the justification for rationality? Is that what you’re asking that we can actually understand?

[00:11:57] Bryan Callen: I’m suggest if you extrapolate in one direction or the other, it seems that for example we, we admire certain things and seem to our, our head raises and we look in the direction there as opposed to there. Because we know there lies the good things we may never reach. We can’t measure. I’m thinking of perfection. Let’s just take the idea of Jesus Christ as the symbol, forget Messiah or the man. The idea of this 33 year old man who sacrificed his own body for a higher principle, tortured on the cross and said I love you anyway and I forgive you. That, that idea, I mean he lost everything, unjustly accused, all that stuff.

And then you have Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar, the most powerful man in the world. You would think that from a measurable scientific analysis, you better off being Julius Caesar than you are Jesus Christ. There’s a lot of pain over here and a lot of pleasure in this direction.

[00:13:00] Michael Shermer: Wait a minute. Wasn’t he assassinated?

[00:13:02] Bryan Callen: Well, he may have been, but let’s just take, let’s just take anybody like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or anybody who’s lived this, or a movie star, for God’s sake. It could be Brad Pitt or, or Ryan Reynolds. We seem to admire this other thing. We seem to admire the footsteps that Jesus walked, or even if we’re not Christians, over the footsteps this other person walked. And that seems to suggest that maybe that person dovetails along the sort of the grain of the universe. There’s a better way to go. What about that?

[00:13:38] Michael Shermer: Okay, so you might be after something, say different kinds of truths. So I make this. You’d say empirical truths, like the examples I just gave. Perhaps the Big Bang theory is wrong and there’s some other better theory, this could happen and so forth. But what you’re talking about is maybe something slightly different, like a political truth or a religious truth or a moral truth. You know, what did Dr. King stand for?

[00:13:59] Bryan Callen: Talking about an overall truth.

[00:14:01] Michael Shermer: Yeah, because you.

[00:14:02] Dr. Stephen Meyer: A metaphysical belief.

[00:14:03] Bryan Callen: Yes, because Michael, you.

[00:14:05] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Comprehensive worldview or philosophical perspective that gives coherence to your understanding of all of reality.

[00:14:13] Bryan Callen: I think that’s what we’re doing here. I think that’s what we are doing here. I think that’s why we are sitting down and talking. Because whether we want to admit it or not, we’re trying to get to a deeper understanding.

[00:14:25] Michael Shermer: Yeah, I’d say that exists that, that kind of truth, the search for truth is a truth.

[00:14:29] Bryan Callen: So what is that about?

[00:14:30] Michael Shermer: Yeah, that’s. Well, because we have to function in the world and you know, we have to solve problems to survive and flourish. And that involves understanding the way the world actually is. And that’s what our brains are well designed to do. And we are reasonably rational to that extent. So.

[00:14:44] Bryan Callen: But chimps, chimps don’t have that. And.

[00:14:46] Michael Shermer: Well, they, they do to a certain extent, but. But far less than we do. They have a time horizon much shorter than our. You know, we are really quite unusual as a primate.

But. So if you’re asking, well, I don’t know, let’s go back to these different kinds of truths. You know, it’s like you mentioned Jesus. So here’s a question. Do you mean was Jesus crucified, dead for three days, resurrected, and the purpose of this was to forgive our original sins and so on as a kind of truth? The question is, do you mean that it really happened or metaphorical truth or a mythical truth?

[00:15:24] Bryan Callen: For me, it’s a metaphorical truth. Right. So for me, for me, for example, I would say let’s take, let’s take democracy, the free market, the constitution, or let’s actually take the idea. Let’s take, let’s take monotheism for a second now. Well, what’s the value there? Well, the value is that we have one father. So that must mean we’re all brothers and sisters. The idea that we’re all of the same moral worth and our justice system is predicated upon that fact. Okay, I can’t measure that. You know, I can’t measure, you know, when we all kind of believe in equality and we speak about it.

[00:15:59] Michael Shermer: I think you could measure.

[00:16:00] Bryan Callen: Well, you could measure it because it seems to be. It seems ultimately to create more bounty than the other way.

[00:16:06] Michael Shermer: So you ask people, would you rather live in a democracy or an autocracy? Would you rather live in North Korea or South Korea? People will tell you they’ll vote with their feet. That’s an objective measure of a deeper metaphorical truth or metaphysical truth of freedom and liberty, autonomy. And that’s the direction our civilization has been moving haltingly for centuries. I argue, contrary to actually most philosophers and political scientists and so on, this is not just an accident of history that we’re marching in a kind of direction toward more freedom and autonomy and individual choice than not to what end? To what end? Ultimately, you are in control of your body. You make decisions for yourself. And a political system that encourages that is better than one that doesn’t. How do I know it’s better? Because if you ask the people what they’d prefer and they’re not being threatened by the dictator to be hauled off to Siberia, if they give the wrong answer, they’ll tell you that we know.

[00:16:58] Bryan Callen: So, so then if that’s the case, it does create not just less suffering. It also, it also, and it doesn’t just encourage the angels of our better nature, it also helps human beings realize their potential to do things that are astonishing. For example, with your book, the idea that there may be, we may be one day able to figure out that there is a code to the universe and somebody had, there had to have been a first mover to that code. That’s, that’s a fascinating idea. And if that’s the case, then that would govern our behavior.

[00:17:36] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, it’s interesting that the system that Michael and I both affirm, the political system, libertarian system, is predicated on a philosophical premise that is not directly observable, I.e. that humans are made in the image of God, that they have intrinsic dignity as a result of that. And therefore we say that we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Now with that as a premise, we can then measure whether or not people prefer to live in that type of a system that accords them that intrinsic dignity. Or North Korea. And I’m not going to argue with Michael about North Korea. We’re entirely.

[00:18:20] Bryan Callen: But you’re exactly right.

[00:18:21] Dr. Stephen Meyer: So there are both observables and unobservables as we begin to think about the big questions. And the God question, I think is a question of metaphysics, but it’s also a question of science. And even the most staunch atheists inadvertently reveal that they accept that as well. Richard Dawkins, for example, has said that the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if at bottom there is no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference, where blind, pitiless indifference is shorthand for undirected material processes. And I think that’s an incredibly helpful statement that he makes. I’m on the opposite.

[00:19:03] Bryan Callen: Why do you think it’s just something to push back on?

[00:19:06] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, because he frames the issue so beautifully. And what he’s implying is that metaphysical beliefs, his belief in materialism as a worldview is the opposite of which is theism or maybe deism. There’s different metaphysical positions, but that metaphysical views are testable against our observations of the world around us every bit as much as scientific hypotheses. So he says the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if materialism is true. And what I do in the book is I say that’s a really interesting way of framing the issue. Let’s now test that and see if what we would expect based on the materialistic hypothesis is actually what we’ve discovered as we’ve looked at the world around us carefully.

[00:19:54] Bryan Callen: But all men are created equal is not materialistic. It is metaphysical.

[00:19:59] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, exactly.

[00:20:00] Bryan Callen: We are starting with.

I’m glad you brought that up because the fact that we are endowed with certain inalienable rights, that is a, that is a mythology we have all embraced. And you can measure that when you embrace that metaphysical concept that actually you could disprove mathematically.

It gives, it gives measure better measurable results. And which is also why I’m a libertarian, by the way. But, but, but individual freedom, right?

[00:20:29] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, the way I put it, Bryan, is that that political viewpoint is a corollary of monotheism. And what I’m interested in is the deeper question of evaluating the monotheistic metaphysical hypothesis and comparing it with its alternatives such as materialism. Lucas Dawkins materialism, which is every bit as much a metaphysical system as theism or deism or pantheism. And to see which of those metaphysical viewpoints actually comport best with the observations we make about the properties of the universe. And I think Dawkins. So Dawkins beautifully frames the issue. I just think he’s wrong in his conclusions.

[00:21:11] Bryan Callen: Your book is rebuttal to that.

[00:21:13] Dr. Stephen Meyer: And I think there have been major discoveries in science that are precisely what you wouldn’t expect from the scientific materialist or scientific atheist point of view. Number one, the universe had a beginning. Number two, the universe has been fine tuned from the beginning to allow for the possibility of life against all odds. And thirdly, that when we look inside the inner recesses of the cell, we find digital information, nanotechnology, complex circuitry, the kinds of things that do not arise from undirected material processes, but instead based on our uniform and repeated experience, which is the basis of all scientific reasoning, only arise from the activity of an intelligent agent. And Dawkins himself has made statements that reveal his. His surprise at the discoveries that are being made. Two summers ago he tweeted about a new animation of the DNA replication system that had been done by an Australian group. And if it’s too hard to describe in an audio interview without. But I’ve got animations of this type of stuff on my website. Exquisite information processing systems that are being discovered inside the cells. Not just that we’ve got digital code and DNA.

[00:22:25] Bryan Callen: Incredible.

[00:22:26] Dr. Stephen Meyer: It’s that there’s sophisticated, hierarchically organized information processing systems at work. And when Dawkins saw one of them animated, he Said he was knocked sideways with wonder at the integrated complexity of this digital information processing system.

[00:22:43] Bryan Callen: I’m glad. I hope it knocks some of his arrogance out of his.

[00:22:45] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, the point is, I want to.

[00:22:47] Bryan Callen: Give you a chance, Michael.

[00:22:48] Dr. Stephen Meyer: I’m also a Bayesian like Michael. Okay. And the idea that we have three. Three things that allow us to test hypotheses. One is we’ve got an original hypothesis, whether it be a scientific hypothesis or metaphysical hypothesis. Those hypotheses about reality generate certain expectations about what we should see, the properties of the universe or life. And then we make observations to see if what we expect to see is what we actually see. And my contention in the book is that what we would expect on a intelligent design, or rather even a theistic design hypothesis.

[00:23:21] Bryan Callen: You’re making him nervous when you say theistic. Keep going.

[00:23:23] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, monotheistic, whatever.

What we see in the universe, relating to big questions about the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the origin of the physical structure of the universe, what we’ve discovered about those big events in biological and cosmological origins comport beautifully with theistic expectations, and they contradict the expectations of the scientific materialists. And that’s the reason that scientific materialism and scientific atheism is getting so weird. That’s why we’ve got multiverses, Multiverses, alien designer hypotheses, simulation hypotheses, the universe from nothing idea that’s been conjoined with emergent quantum cosmology and Lawrence Krauss. This is where I’m also a skeptic, but I’m a skeptic about the magical thinking that materialism now entails. And so I think Michael and I have a lot of commonality and epistemology.

[00:24:20] Bryan Callen: Does that speak to you, Michael?

[00:24:21] Dr. Stephen Meyer: But difference in judgment about. About where the rub is.

[00:24:24] Bryan Callen: Does that sway you a little bit, Michael? Does that get you to kind of like. Does that knock you off your. You’re a healthy skeptic here. But that argument seems so compelling.

[00:24:33] Michael Shermer: First of all, the, you know, blind, pitiless indifference. Planets and stars and galaxies and space time don’t care about me. They don’t even know I exist. And. And who would think otherwise? I think what that the pushback against that quote from Richard is that there must be a mind out there behind the stars and planets and galaxies and space time and so on that would care about us. Something like that. It’s kind of a. I don’t think.

[00:24:57] Bryan Callen: He used the word care, though. I don’t. I don’t know.

[00:24:59] Michael Shermer: You Said, well those were here, you know, created us or some such thing. Right.

[00:25:04] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, I’m just talking about the evidence for intelligent activity you find in something like digital code or nanotechnology or the fine tuning of the laws and constants of physics and the initial conditions of the universe.

[00:25:14] Bryan Callen: Yeah, let’s stick with that idea.

[00:25:15] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Which have moved many physicists from the materialist view to the theistic view.

[00:25:20] Bryan Callen: Some kind of a mind designer. What do you think of that?

[00:25:23] Michael Shermer: There’s these different hypotheses, the multiverse, different versions of string theory and so on. These are not just willy nilly throwing them out there because we don’t want to believe in God. That isn’t the case at all. This was at a conference in Wales yesterday, just returned, in which Roger Penrose was there, Bryan Greene, they were debating string theory, the Big Bang, the origin of the universe. How do you explain it? There is not agreement that there was a beginning called the Big Bang.

Roger Penrose was there promoting his own cyclical theory of the universe. Right. So there is no a beginning, it just cycles through. And so you don’t believe.

[00:26:04] Dr. Stephen Meyer: But my point is this, that’s not actually accurate. There is empirical evidence of a beginning. What Penrose does is postulate an infinite cycle of beginnings for which he has no evidence and has to posit something called a phantom field, which other physicists have rejected on the grounds that the phantom field has attributes that no other physical field ever postulated in physics has, namely mind like characteristics. It can reduce entropy at just the right time in just the right way to allegedly produce another cycle of expansion. But there’s no evidence for an infinite cycle of beginnings. That’s a pure theoretical postulation.

[00:26:42] Michael Shermer: But there’s a lot of that that’s derived from the mathematics apparently, which I don’t study.

That is not just a hand waving move on the part of scientists because they don’t want to believe in God. A lot of scientists do believe in God, it’s just they’re not using that science as a justification of that.

[00:26:58] Dr. Stephen Meyer: So yeah, I’m not saying that any of these alternative models are motivated necessarily by atheism or materialism, although some scientists have been very clear that that is their motivation. I’m just saying that when they’re invoked as explanations, they fail. The multiverse has the problem that it’s based on two speculative cosmological models, string theory and inflationary cosmology, both of which require prior unexplained fine tuning to make them plausible. So even if you go with a multiverse you’re back to ultimate fine tuning.

[00:27:31] Bryan Callen: Back to this circle. We’re back to, you know, I’m not any closer to the truth. I’m just in a world of theorem and theory. And let me, let me, let me simplify. Maybe, maybe this is a better way.

[00:27:41] Dr. Stephen Meyer: I cut him off though.

[00:27:42] Bryan Callen: I should let him start.

[00:27:44] Michael Shermer: My larger point was that we don’t know for sure, you know, what bang, the big bang, what was there before the big bang, and so on. So there’s a lot of speculation. There’s no theory of everything to unite general relativity and quantum mechanics. That was one of the themes at this conference. You know, there’s half a dozen, dozen different ideas. People have their, their own pet theories and so on. They’re very difficult to test, if at all, or maybe they eventually will be tested. You know, that was one of the. And one of the themes of this conference was you guys promoting the standard theory are going too far.

You don’t have the kinds of confidence you should. That you would need with the evidence that we have. Therefore, it’s still open to debate. So the idea that there’s this one, there’s one theory here, and then there’s the God hypothesis. No, there’s actually a dozen over here, and we don’t know which is the right one.

[00:28:31] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, that’s not quite an accurate characterization of the way I argue the case, because what I show is that there are multiple cosmological models and even the ones that are attempting to undermine the claim or the evidence for a definite beginning to matter, space, time and energy, such as quantum cosmological models or the cyclic model of Penrose or the Steinhardt model, that if they get rid of the beginning, they end up having subtle theistic implications for other reasons. So these many.

[00:29:08] Bryan Callen: Are those implications are those subtle theistic implications. The idea that there has to be a first mover is that typically what.

[00:29:13] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Happens is that if you reject an absolute temporal beginning to the universe with one of these other models, you end up creating more acute fine tuning problems. The quantum cosmological models have that problem in quantum cosmology, which was the famous, you know, approach of Hawking and Hartle.

[00:29:32] Bryan Callen: I don’t know what that is. Sorry. Quantum cosmology.

[00:29:35] Dr. Stephen Meyer: There was a very popular book by Stephen Hawking, the Brief History of Time.

[00:29:40] Bryan Callen: Yeah, I read it. Couldn’t get.

[00:29:41] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Yeah, yeah, no, it’s.

[00:29:42] Bryan Callen: Look at my face.

[00:29:44] Dr. Stephen Meyer: It’s a very difficult book because it purports to be a great book.

[00:29:47] Bryan Callen: Is. And I know they didn’t understand it because I Started reading it and I was like, I go down the wormhole here. And I was like, hey man, I didn’t study physics. I don’t know what I’m doing here.

[00:29:56] Michael Shermer: So.

[00:29:56] Bryan Callen: Yeah, yeah.

[00:29:57] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, in Hawking’s book, he purports to get rid of the beginning in his popular book by invoking something called imaginary time. And he makes a mathematical transformation in the description of space time of the universe. But he gets rid of the implication of a beginning to time only as an intermediate step in a mathematical procedure. And that intermediate step involves imaginary numbers which have no physical meaning. In that intermediate step, when he converts the transformation back to real time, the singularity reemerges. And in all his technical work with James Hartle up at Santa Barbara on, they never get rid of the singularity. They have to presuppose the singularity to try to explain the origin of the universe using principles of quantum mechanics. And what’s really interesting about the. And these are really the main alternatives to standard Big Bang cosmology with a definite beginning to the universe. And what’s interesting in all of these models is that they end up explaining the universe by reference to pre existing mathematics rather than a pre existing material state. So you have this weird condition where you’ve got math, which is inherently conceptual, somehow producing matter. And Alexander Volinkin, one of the great Russian physicists who’s advanced quantum cosmology, has said before there’s matter, space, time and energy, what tablet could these physical laws have been written on? Mathematics is the domain of the mind. Are we really saying, therefore in this approach, are we implying that the universe came from a mind? And so what I do in the book is show that philosophers call this developing a robust case for something that there’s a kind of decision tree. If you go standard Big Bang based on general relativity, you got a definite beginning. And that has an implication that’s theistic. You don’t like that approach. You want to go quantum cosmological. That has a different theistic implication. If you want to go with Penrose and Steinhardt, these guys create their models, create more acute fine tuning problems, which requires a prior mind. And so, yeah, I mean, very difficult to.

[00:32:07] Bryan Callen: Whether it’s math or a big bang. Yeah, there had to have been the.

[00:32:11] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Materials have a problem on any point in the decision tree.

[00:32:14] Bryan Callen: Because we’re back to the first. It’s not just we.

[00:32:16] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Yeah, it’s. It’s.

[00:32:16] Bryan Callen: Isn’t that what it is? Aren’t we. Are we back to it? Isn’t it Wasn’t it new, there is.

[00:32:20] Dr. Stephen Meyer: The need for the first cause. But there’s also a problem of specificity. We live in a universe with very specific configurations of matter that create all the wonders around us, the beauties of biological systems, the beauties of our planet, the stability of the solar system. And the game of physics from the beginning is to try to describe or explain everything by very simple regularities. And you don’t get complexity out of regularity. If you want specified complexity, if you want to configure matter in a specific way, you can’t just say, well, there was one simple law. Because what laws do is describe regular patterns that repeat over and over again. Sun up, sun down, all matter gravitates. I drop the thing, it falls. I drop the thing, it falls. I drop the thing, it falls. Laws like that do not provide adequate explanations for the specificity of the genetic code or the anatomy of a turtle.

[00:33:14] Bryan Callen: We’re talking about systems or the fine.

[00:33:17] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Tuning of the universe. There is an attempt within the materialist framework to try to square a circle, to get something for nothing in terms of information, or what we call specified complexity, to get specificity out of simplicity. Do you agree with that, Michael? That’s a fundamental problem that has not been solved by any of these models. And they all run up against it when you examine them.

[00:33:36] Bryan Callen: Michael?

[00:33:37] Michael Shermer: Well, if you actually talk to the people that do the work, they disagree with this. They say we can explain complexity. We can explain how genomes get more complex symbiosis of simpler cells into more complex cells, like Lynn Margulis’s theory of symbiogenesis, that the cells we have now, these eukaryotic cells that we’re made out of, have complex systems within them that were originally simpler cells. And the genomes got more complex, purely natural, bottom up emergent properties of systems. Just symbiotically.

[00:34:06] Bryan Callen: When you say emergent properties, what do you mean by can you explain emergence?

[00:34:10] Michael Shermer: Well, so just just combining organisms into a more complex organism. This happens naturally. You don’t need an intervention of some outside force to that. But let me just pull back for a second because there’s a move being made here in which we run up against some, something we can’t quite explain. And then there’s an invocation of somehow mind did it. So I want to ask, what does that mean? And why can I ask? Well, what’s the origin of this mind?

Does the mind itself, whatever it is, God, or just some super advanced extraterrestrial intelligence or whatever, doesn’t it need an origin? Why Is it not reasonable for me to ask, you know, you want to go back, you know, causal chain. Well, how about one more step back to, well, where did that mind come from? And if your answer is, well, it always existed outside of space, my answer.

[00:35:01] Bryan Callen: Might be something different. So my answer might be very simple. So it’s a very good question. But. But I think we’re talking about the God question here. So. So the reason that I don’t have to go beyond that is only because I am.

We are probably looking for. We have a hierarchy of values, and there is not only the. There’s something at the top of that value, but there’s probably something that, you know, that we have. An imagination. I’ll never see the number infinity. I’ll never see a negative integer, but I can use those numbers, and I can. I can use those numbers to, to. To come up with material realities. Okay, so math, even if it’s theoretical math, can be used to put a rover on Mars, for example.

I know that I will never see a perfect horse, but I can imagine a perfect horse or a perfect person or my perfect self. And therefore I have this. This idea I’m reaching for. So I think that for our purposes as human beings here in this world, the idea that there is a first mover is enough to govern not only my behavior, but to give me purpose for what I’m doing.

[00:36:17] Michael Shermer: Well, why can’t you just derive the purpose from the here and now?

[00:36:21] Bryan Callen: I’ll tell you why. Because I become. I become a relativist. So. So you just start talking about plural truths.

[00:36:26] Michael Shermer: Yeah, okay, right.

[00:36:27] Bryan Callen: You know what I mean. You were saying there are a lot of facts and a lot. There’s an infinite number of truths and an infinite number of facts.

[00:36:31] Michael Shermer: Yeah, but you don’t have to be a relativist. And why not? It’s not a choice between believing in God and absolute morality and pure relativism. Now, there’s lots of positions in between, like utilitarianism and ontological ethics and so on that just derived from reason and in our study of human nature. But that’s a slight side of it. Let’s go back to this question of, you know, so you want to stop the causal chain here and say that’s the first cause, the mind or God or whatever. But why not? Just one more step. Well, and maybe the right answer is nobody actually knows. You can’t go back infinitely. So we just have to say, I don’t know. That seems reasonable to me. If it turns out there is a God or A higher power, a mind or whatever. Okay, well, that might be why. I don’t see why that, that would challenge.

[00:37:16] Dr. Stephen Meyer: I can answer is why not?

[00:37:17] Bryan Callen: I’d love to hear whenever you want to hear it because, but just, just to frame that. I think one of the reasons, for example, if you were to talk to a rabbinical scholar or something, or, or an Islamic cleric, the idea of giving any kind of a form to God, a picture of God or human, human parameters to God is, is sacrilege.

[00:37:41] Michael Shermer: Right?

[00:37:41] Bryan Callen: It’s heretical because it’s not for us to understand. It’s. It’s something that’s beyond our comprehension. So I’m just saying that would be the religious.

[00:37:50] Michael Shermer: I mean, that could be, you know, that God is the ground of all being or something that we can’t, it’s outside of space and time or it’s so wholly other we can’t understand.

[00:37:57] Bryan Callen: I think it’s interesting that it’s true.

[00:37:58] Michael Shermer: But then how do you know that it’s true? That is, I don’t want to believe things that have to be believed in to be true. That is, I want them to go.

[00:38:07] Dr. Stephen Meyer: I’m not going to go the direction of ineffable. Okay. I think there’s a more concrete way of addressing Michael’s objection. First of all, I want to flag the Lynn Margulis symbiosis hypothesis, which I think is laughably inadequate now because we know when you, when you actually allow one bacterium to try to ingest another, the other one gets gobbled up. This is causally completely inadequate based on our knowledge of how biology works. And there’s much deeper questions about the origin of genes and proteins that have to be answered to make evolutionary theory, again, plausible, which it is not. Major leading figures are now calling for a new theory of evolution because the mutation selection mechanism is inadequate to do anything more than explain small scale variations.

[00:38:51] Bryan Callen: So Darwin’s theory of relevance.

[00:38:53] Dr. Stephen Meyer: But I just flagged that the deeper question that Michael asks is a great one. And my answer to that is that the question about, well, why invoke a mind as the prime reality, the thing from which everything else comes as opposed to matter? And the first thing to say about that is that every metaphysical system, every worldview has to posit a prime reality or an ontological ground of being. Every system does that. The question is, what is the better candidate to be that thing from which everything else comes, Matter and energy or a mind? And I think, to use Dawkins’s framing, the properties of the universe suggest that a mind Provides a better candidate because the things that we see in life and the universe that require primary explanation are things that have features that we know from our uniform and repeated experience, are only produced by intelligent agents. So if you want to explain the origin of life, we now know that we need to explain the digital code that’s stored in DNA and rna. That digital code has a property, it’s known as sequence specificity, or specified complexity or functional information. There are different synonyms within the information sciences. One of the great information scientists, Henry Quassler, said that information is habitually produced by conscious activity. We know from our uniform and experience when we see code or something that’s functioning as digital code, it took a programmer to produce it. And absent materialistic explanations, and we are absent adequate materialistic explanations. And I’ve written a 500 page book exploring the different approaches in origin of life research that have attempted to solve this mystery. They all come up short for very fundamental theoretical reasons. We do have another cause of which we know that is capable of producing code and information, and that’s a mind. Same thing when we talk about fine tuning. Fine tuning is shorthand for an ensemble of parameters which function jointly to accomplish some overall outcome or function.

When we see systems that are finely tuned, whether they’re French recipes or internal combustion engines, or the interrelationship between digital code and hardware in a computer, those finely tuned systems invariably rose from an intelligent agent, not an undirected process.

So I think that mind, when we see fine tuning at the foundation of the universe, when we see foundation, when we see information at the foundation of life, we’re looking at features that in our experience are best explained by intelligent agency. And therefore it is more rational, positive mind as the ground of being than it is to posit pure materialism. Michael and I both agree that we both oppose magical thinking. But the question is, what’s more magical? Is it more magical to posit a multiverse or something? Or posit causal properties, causal powers to brute inanimate matters that we know it doesn’t exist based on our observation of what quarks or nucleotide bases or the chemical constituents of living things do on their own? Or is it more rational to posit a mind knowing as we do, that minds are real, we possess them. We know that by direct introspective experience, and that minds have certain causal powers that we also know by introspective observation of our own minds and by observing what other minds have done and can do. Mind is a real thing. It gets written out of Reality. I think we got to bring it back. This is the point of Thomas Nagel’s great book, Mind and Cosmos.

[00:42:36] Bryan Callen: Yeah, you get me. I’m swayed to your argument, but I love Michael because Michael looks like a skeptic. You’re doing this, you’re going. And you’re like, man, literally your eyes are squinting here. You’re going, this is Michael, Michael, Michael. Basically. Basically your sound bite is this. Well, yeah, and I love that about you because that’s literally what your body language is saying. But are you on a couple points? Are you swayed more in Stephen’s direction than Hawking’s direction?

[00:43:05] Michael Shermer: No, more of Hawking’s direction.

[00:43:06] Bryan Callen: Really?

[00:43:07] Michael Shermer: Yeah. So. All right, just, let’s just.

[00:43:09] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Hawking was a God obsessed atheist. And I can tell you more about that. I sat through some of his lectures in Cambridge and I would not make him the poster child for atheism because he was tortured.

[00:43:20] Michael Shermer: You know, he proved, okay, I gotta.

[00:43:23] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Say, that he proved the singularity theory and then spent 30 years trying to circumvent his own proof for the absolute beginning of the universe. I mean, he’s a really interesting figure.

[00:43:31] Michael Shermer: I don’t know how tortured he was. I mean, his co author, Leonard Malen now is one of my best friends. And, you know, they wrote the Grand Design together. And Len has this story about how when the book came out, he gets this call from somebody in England, Stephen secretary, going, oh, my God, oh my God. You have to do all these interviews. Stephen can’t do them. You know, there’s this explosive head headline and the Guardian, you know, Stephen Hawking says there is no God and he’s proved it. And. And Len says, oh, my God, we never said that. That’s not what we’re doing at all. You know, and so I don’t know how tortured he was. I mean, he was probably more like an agnostic than an atheist, but whatever. The words are kind of loaded. Okay, a couple things.

So if you take something like the economy, it’s a complex adaptive system, lots of moving parts. It looks designed, but in fact it’s not designed. It’s not the result of human design. It’s the result of human action. And out of that human action emerges this incredible complexity. Despite what the Bernie Sanders type social democrats and socialists want to say they can design the economy, they can’t because there’s too many moving parts. So that looks like, well, there must be somebody behind the scenes running this economy. There isn’t.

[00:44:39] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, there were lots of somebodies and there were also A lot of initial constraints on the possible ways of organizing society that made the economy, that makes the free market economy generate complexity. Within all those unspecified interactions between the players.

[00:44:55] Michael Shermer: There’s no overarching mind saying, okay, we’re going to bring this into fruition here, right? Same thing with language. There’s no one saying, we’re now going to use the word 9, 11 from this date forward. It just from the bottom up kind of spontaneously emerges into complexity.

[00:45:10] Bryan Callen: But there is the idea of Adam Smith and James Madison and the Federalist Papers and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that made this free market economy.

[00:45:21] Dr. Stephen Meyer: We’ve got to have the rule of law which is specified by property rights. You got to have property rights, you’ve got to have a legal system that allows for restoration.

[00:45:30] Bryan Callen: There does seem to be an overarching mind. Right. There was a fixed point of truth.

[00:45:34] Dr. Stephen Meyer: A better example for us to debate this would be something like a genetic algorithm. Okay, and these are, these are.

[00:45:40] Michael Shermer: I’m just gonna make one, one last point. Okay, so like this microphone here is complex. It looks designed. It is designed. I could go to the shure manufacturer and see where it’s built, or I can go to Google and to see the programmers making software. Well, they won’t let me in because I don’t work there, but intellectual property stuff. But anyway, where can I go to see the designer of DNA or the laws of nature? Where is this designer? Where do I go to see this?

[00:46:07] Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, where do you go to see the designer of your Apple iPhone?

The designer of that is no longer on the planet. He’s passed away. We make lots of inferences in science from effects back to causes that are unobservable, whether those are we infer dark matter or we infer dark energy, or we infer quarks, or we infer lots of things. The structure of scientific inference is inherently, I agree, indirect in that you move from the observable to the unobservable. And there’s no in principle difference from inferring to dark matter or the cosmological constant or gravitational force from the effects of those things than there is to inferring an intelligence from a characteristic effect of intelligence, which is digital information.

[00:46:54] Michael Shermer: Okay, back to my conference I mentioned. So one of the things, the invocation of dark energy and dark matter, that’s like 95% of the universe. And without invoking intelligent design or anything like that, it was just massive pushback by, you know, outside outsiders, but just challengers, skeptics, let’s say, of the standard model and the standard cosmology and so on that most people say they accept. You guys are just using that word dark energy and dark matter, you don’t know what it is. And they go, yeah, we don’t know what it is, but we’re going to figure it out. Yeah, but maybe the entire framework is wrong. So I think there is rigorous debate about just within.

[00:47:31] Dr. Stephen Meyer: I agree with that. And I think there’s a lot in physics that has that property that Leibniz accused Newton of enjoining, which was occult, he called gravitational. You posit a force, you give it a name because.

Not because you understand what the force is, but because it’s a name for what the thing does and we don’t really know what it is in its essence. Yeah, but a lot of dark matter was posited to explain certain motions of galaxies that were inexplicable on our standard understandings of gravity. So. But the point is that science has. They’re called transdictive inferences in the philosophy of science, where you move from an observable to an unobservable and you hold to the reality of the unobservable based on its explanatory power or its superior explanatory power vis a vis other possible postulates.

And people want to say there’s something inherently irrational or anti scientific or anti Bayesian or anti philosophical about inferring to agency or mind. And I want to say, no, it’s the exact same type of inference we make in science. It’s from an observable to an unobservable. The difference is we have direct experience of what minds can do. Unless we want to deconstruct our own minds, which is what materialists invariably end up doing. You press these guys hard enough, they’re going to say, well, my mind is just the product of all these impersonal Marxian type forces. Maybe not Michael, because he’s free market, but I’ve been on debate stages with, with evolutionary biologists will say, what is mind? I can’t really make anything of that. And one of my colleagues, Paul Nelson, had this exchange with Niles Eldritch one time. He says, niles, when you. You’ve written a brilliant book about punctuated equilibrium, when you get royalties sent to you, are they sent to all the impersonal forces that forced you to think what you thought and wrote in your book? Or are they sent to the person, Niles Eldridge, who has a mind?

[00:49:27] Speaker B: That was Dr. Stephen Meyer and Michael Shermer with their host Bryan Callan, discussing a variety of topics related to Intelligent design, evolution, information, mind, and God. We’re grateful to the producers of the Bryan Callan show for permission to share this exchange on ID the Future.

Look out for the concluding half of this conversation in a separate episode.

Check out more from Bryan callan at his YouTube channel, @BryanCallanComedy that’s @BryanCallanComedy. For ID the Future. I’m Andrew McDiarmid. Thanks for listening.